Ten of us had a lively book discussion via Zoom last week and shared recommendations. While every book club, such as the book worms' pictured here, has a different aesthetic, our library book club has room for everyone's tastes.
Tammy is the latest happy person I know who read Tana French’s newest book, The Searcher. If you haven’t tried French, many of us love her mysteries, including the Dublin Murder Squad series. Tammy also has a hard time putting down the Mary Russell series by Laurie King and is on the eighth out of seventeen. Mary Russell’s character is Sherlock Holmes’ wife and partner against crime. I’ve read the first Russell book and liked it, too. With our genre conversation that we have going, note that this series is sometimes listed as historical fiction because of the Holmes connection despite Holmes being fictional. (Just another reminder of how these things are fluid which is sometimes another word for weird.)
Judy very much liked 7 Visions 7 Truths by David Sherbarth which takes readers through the Book of Revelations, “unwinding” it in Judy’s words, to make it understandable to the reader. On the other hand, Judy found Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread disappointing.
Sue read The Eighty Dollar Champion: The Horse that Inspired a Nation. If you like books that inspire, great animal stories, and overcoming long odds, you’ll love this true story of a horse saved on his way to the slaughterhouse. Snowman went on to the top of the tough show jumping competition and inspired Americans during the Cold War.
We all love to find a new series and Susan T. has done that with Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano, the first in a mystery series. Finlay has an idea for a book that she pitches to her agent, but someone overhears and thinks that she’s a contract killer. Real crime, though, is complicated.
Sheri read Harry Dolan’s Bad Things Happen. Dolan is a master of noir detective stories who lives in Ann Arbor, so Michigan settings that are familiar to us are everywhere in this book. He used the same protagonist in Very Bad Men. I’m a fan of Dolan myself. He doesn’t publish often but is always worth the wait.
Beth read Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee, with the subtitle The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. Lee makes the case that we’ve been told to tune inward, meditate, and shut out the external world so much that we can fail to appreciate how our surroundings, light, color – the most ordinary things – can create joy, peace, and happiness, and we can often control our surroundings for just that effect.
Ruthie, who had felt in a reading slump of late, was happy to share that she found reading with liked. Perhaps my favorite fictional form, the short story (yes, that’s a genre, too), is one of those. Fox 8 by George Saunders is a 52-page read or a 37-minute listen. Like many wonderful stories, this one is ostensibly for children. A fox lurks about and learns to speak Yuman. Can he apply his skills to save his skulk (a group of foxes)?
Deb, as always, had a long list of books. The one that fascinated me most was Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American classic. A WWII veteran, wounded and captured by the Japanese, returns home to the Pueblo reservation. In order to heal, he needs to immerse himself in his own history and tradition.
Pam read a cutting-edge non-fiction book entitled The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We are by Libby Copeland which is in audio only. While DNA testing seems to be more popular every day among the curious, the implications are far reaching, presenting legal and ethical questions that one might like to think about before sending in that DNA for analysis.
Join us the second Tuesday of any month for Books for Lunch, the ultimate no-pressure book club. Email me for the next Zoom invitation at rozatlibrary@gmail.com.
Meantime keep track of all library events on our website and Facebook page.
See you at the Library!